Book 778: The Mosquito – Timothy C. Winegard

Well if I wasn’t already so jaded from having lived through the last nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic, I’d be terrified mosquitos were coming to exterminate all of us!

I accepted this galley back in April when the pandemic was just really kicking off.* And then I promptly forgot about it for a few months, followed by avoiding it for even longer because it just didn’t feel right to read it with the way the world was going. I finally decided I needed to clear my galley backlog and this was the oldest so here we are. This particular quote caught me with all the rumors flying about where COVID-19 came from:

Zoonosis rates have tripled in the last ten years, and account for 75% of all human diseases. The goal of health researchers is to identify potential ‘spillover’ germs before they make a zoonotic jump to humans. (Ch. 18)

After reading this book, I feel like wherever coronavirus came from it was like “hey Mosquito, hold my beer,” and then it seriously underwhelmed when you look at the stats in this book!

For the most part I found the book fascinating. Winegard’s style is very conversational and I feel like he’d be a great instructor in a classroom. The seemingly tangential way he connected things from an NFL player’s near-death experience in Colorado (from sickle cell anemia) to world conquerors like Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great, this book really does cover a huge expanse of time.

This is probably the most concise description of the novel taken from the conclusion,

The mosquito sponsored both the rise and fall of ancient empires, she gave birth to independent nations while callously subduing and subjugating others. She has crippled and even razed economies. She has prowled the most momentous and pivotal battlefields, menaced and slaughtered the greatest armies of her generations, and outmaneuvered the most celebrated generals and military minds ever mustered to arms, slaying many of these men in the course of her carnage. Throughout our history of violence, Generals Anopheles and Aedes [mosquito types] were powerful weapons of war, moonlighting as formidable foes of avaricious allies.

And Winegard touched on all of it and it was honestly a bit overwhelming. For the list of dead by mosquito-born-disease he name-checked included: Alexander the Great, Hannibal, at least seven popes, Dante Alighieri, Genghis Kahn, multiple civilizations, Sir Frances Drake, and Oliver Cromwell. There were I’m sure dozens of others (including eight American Presidents who didn’t die but had malaria) and the staggering number of people who’ve died because of mosquitos it’s just hard to even fathom.

One takeaway from the book for me was that humans have always been horrible when it comes to biological warfare. not only did Winegard trace ancient Greeks and Romans using the bogs around Rome to their benefit but he provided specific examples of humans using biological warfare that stood out in my mind:

During the siege of the port city of Kaffa in 1346, the Mongols catapulted infected bubonic plague corpses over the city walls to contaminate the inhabitants and break the siege. (Ch. 6)

The mosquito and her diseases were the substance of bone-chilling experimentation and medical and weapons research by both the Axis and Allied powers. We could now harness her destructive power and her dominion of death to purge our human enemies. (Ch. 17)

And this doesn’t include the number of times he catalogued colonists (or regulars) wanting to use diseased blankets/clothing to either directly harm indigenous populations or the opposition during the American Revolutionary War. it just turned my stomach to read that and once again reminded me how woefully undereducated/miseducated(?) we are growing up.

The biggest detraction of the book for me was the hyper focus on the Western world post WWII. Winegard spent so much time walking us through ancient Greece and Rome, the Persian Empire, the Mongol Empire, the African continent, and then just sort of lumped everything after that into a less-than-stellar global generalization. A huge part of this comes from where the priority of western medicine and investments came from especially after the discovery/impact of HIV.

The mysterious, perplexing human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and its symptomatic counterpart, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), were consuming public commentary, driving cultural fear, and monopolizing medical research budgets. The promise of a cure meant money-spinning prescription payouts. (Ch. 18)

But it left me wanting. How have mosquito vector diseases continued to affect the African continent since the end of the slave trade? And ditto on Asia between the last major emperors and communism? What was going on there? He sort of touched on these things but not to the extent he touched on the America and Europe and that felt like a bit hole in the “human history” of mosquitos. I don’t know if it was just a lack of resources in English, but it was by far the biggest issue for me.

Winegard mentioned dozens of books but these stood out to me because I’ve already read the one and the others I’ve either owned at some point or have read excerpts of and would like to actually read at some point:

• Silent Spring – Rachel Carson
• Guns, Germs, and Steal – Jared Diamond
• Common Sense – Thomas Paine
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Coffee: A Dark History – Antony Wild

And to me, that’s the sign of a good nonfiction work, it makes you want to know more about something. It doesn’t necessarily have to be what the focus of the book is on, but it needs to pique your interest enough to want to keep researching!

Recommendation: I knew I’d enjoy this book when I requested it. I mean give me something that seems a little bit weird and for the most part I’m going to be happy, and I was with this book. The coverage of the book was staggering and although there was a pretty heavy western slant (especially toward the end of the work) I found it to be cohesive and approachable. I can easily imagine enjoying a class taught by Winegard from his totally nerdy Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings references to the enthusiasm you can clearly feel as he weaves a personal narrative into this work.

*I received a copy of The Mosquito from the publisher via NetGalley in return for my honest opinion. No goods or money were exchanged.

Opening Line: “We are at war with the mosquito.”

Closing Line: “She outlived the extinction-level event of the dinosaurs and has repeatedly shape-shifted to frustrate all our labors of extermination. Across our existence she has determined the fates of nations, decided momentous wars, and helped design our global arrangement, killing nearly half of humanity along the way. CRISPR, like DDT and other tools of execution, however, may also succumb to her evolving bite. History has shown her to be a dogged survivor. For now, the indefatigable mosquito remains our deadliest predator.” (Not whited out as this is a work of nonfiction.)

Additional Quotes from The Mosquito
“Since 2000, the annual average number of human deaths caused by the mosquito has hovered around two million.” (Intro.)

“Coffee is the world’s second most valuable (legal) commodity after petroleum, and the most widely used psychoactive drug, with Americans consuming 25% of the market share.” (Ch. 2)

“Those animals that were collected and nurtured within the human environment, however, delivered with dire consequences. To inventory just a few examples, horses conveyed the common cold virus; from chickens came ‘bird flu,’ chickenpox, and shingles; pigs and ducks donated influenza; and from cattle arose measles, tuberculosis, and smallpox.”(Ch. 2)

“The ‘germs’ in Jared Diamond’s title trifecta Guns, Germs, and Steel were far and away the most effective tool of colonization and the subjugation and extermination of indigenous peoples. In numerous (I hate to say all) European colonial outposts, indigenous peoples suffered genocide by germs.” (Ch. 7)

“It was the dissemination of exotic European germs and foreign mosquitoes and their diseases unconsciously acting as invasive and offensive biological weapons that sounded the death knell for indigenous peoples.” (Ch. 7)

“This [cinchon bark] was not some sorcerer’s stone amulet, ‘expecto patronum’ incantation, or recited abracadabra dirge.” (Ch. 7)

“Many slave laws and the social conventions and customs of the ancient world were compassionate, sympathetic, and surprisingly concerned with the well-being and equitable treatment of slaves. In other cultures, slavery was localized and relatively small-scale and exhibited none of the tormenting and cruel traits of African chattel slavery.” (Ch. 8)

“The mosquito provoked history to unfold in mysterious and macabre ways. Her insurance of the African slave trade is certainly one of the her more sinister historical influences and cruel manipulations during the Columbian Exchange.” (Ch. 8)

“Only Americans styled (and still do) the Seven Years’ War by a distinguishing name, the French and Indian War, that reflects their hostility toward the perceived indigenous obstruction to their own heaven-ordained westward expansion, recloaked in the mid-nineteenth century as Manifest Destiny. Given this American colonial rancor, with the ratification of the financially pressured Royal Proclamation, Pontiac was appeased and the colonies were punished.” (Ch. 11)

“In the wake of the binding Stamp Act of 1765, these future insurgents met in the dank basement of Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern and Coffeehouse, which gained the historical reputation as the ‘Headquarters of the Revolution.’ I like to envisage the Green Dragon as something akin to the Prancing Pony Tavern from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, where scheming, shifty-eyed, cloaked and hooded colonists sip on bitter tea or coffee while sneeringly conspiring to plot revolution.”(Ch. 12)

“Having amassed enormous wealth at the expense of African plantation slaves, European imperialist powers were now reaping a trans-Atlantic whirlwind of disease and death imported directly from their mercantilist American empires and the mosquito ecologies they themselves created. In an ironic twist of fate, or perhaps even karma if you prefer, the mosquito was now biting back at the mother countries of Europe for their reshuffling of global ecosystems during their Columbian Exchange.” (Ch. 13)

“Written in response to the Fugitive Slave Act, Stowe highlighted in unadulterated, graphic prose the  evils and brutality of slavery. The influence of Stowe’s book in garnering support for the abolitionist movement cannot be overstated. Uncle Tom’s Cabin cleaved a deep wound between north and south over the future of slavery. When President Lincoln met Stowe as his honored guest at the White House in 1862, he supposedly greeted her by saying, ‘So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started a great big war.'” (Ch. 14)

“More Americans died in the Civil War than all other American wars combined. Of the 360,000 Union dead, 65% died of disease. More than 1.3 million cases of malaria were recorded by Union hospitals, with 10,000 deaths, although the actual numbers are presumably much higher. In certain southern theaters of war, particularly in the Carolinas, annual malaria rates reached a nauseating 235%.” (Ch. 15)

“And so the Civil War, like so many wars that came before it and so many that came after, was consumed by mosquito-borne disease and deadly pestilence.” (Ch. 15)

“Like most historical events, the discovery of the mosquito as the vector for multiple contagions including filariasis, malaria, and yellow fever was tied directly to global empire, mercantilism, and capitalism in Cuba, Panama, and beyond.” (Ch. 16)

“Whether hitchhiking or freight hoping on (or in) the earliest human migrants leaving Africa, on a slave ship bound for the Americas courtesy of the Columbian Exchange, or on a 747 flight or Airbus A380, not much has really changed. Disease is enduring and embedded human luggage.” (Ch. 19)